Hairy anatomical holes

So, uh, yeah. That’s the sync theme du jour. Don’t blame me. William Wright started this when he had a dream about Eric Cartman saying, "Oh my God, my asshole is so hairy!" and then decided to do like three posts about it.

Today I read this in The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns by Paul Stobbs, winner of the 2024 Best Title Ever Award:

When one imagines larger-than-life humanoid sightings in the modern era, the most mainstream example is the hairy apple of every cryptozoologist's keen eye: Bigfoot.

The phrase "apple of one's eye" was originally an anatomical term referring to the pupil of the eye -- that is, to a body part which is, like the anus, a hole.

And it's about Bigfoot, because of course it is.

Be careful around the fabric of reality, Garfeld

 I randomly ran into this this morning. It fits in with the old warp-and-woof black hole theme:

When I tried to find the original Garfield strip this is based on, my first searches just turned up countless variants on this "fabric of reality" meme, so I guess it's fairly popular, although I'd never seen it before.

I did eventually track down the original strip: March 2, 1979:

Based polygamy denier

My baseline assumption tends to be that anyone who gets called a "denier" is more likely than not to be right -- because really, when have people saddled with that label ever been wrong? (Please don't mention the elephant in the room in the comments! Yes, that included.) Anyway, right or wrong, "denialism" (a.k.a. challenging the dominant narrative) is unquestionably based, and I support it.

In the specific case of "polygamy denial" -- the position, contrary to that of both the CJCLDS and 99% of its critics, that Joseph Smith never taught or practiced plural marriage -- it's a relatively hard sell for me. I'm pretty well read in the mainstream narrative and find it convincing. I'm open to other possibilities, though, and Jeremy Hoop has piqued my interest with his new video series setting out to disprove Joseph Smith's polygamy once and for all.

His first video lays out his position and summarizes the game plan for this extremely ambitious undertaking:

The second reads the Abinadi story in the light of Jacob's polygamy sermon in a way that is very clever and plausible, and which has implications that go beyond the polygamy question, and about which I may post later:

I'd say the series is off to a good start, and I look forward to seeing how he develops it, and how he deals with all the evidence on the other side -- which he is clearly both very familiar with and very confident in his ability to debunk.

Star anise

This morning, I checked William Wright’s blog and read his latest post, “The Star Anus.”

Bill tells the story of how his family got some bratwursts which his wife refused to eat because she (and she alone) could detect the flavor of some spice she didn’t like. A day or two later, she finally identified the offending ingredient: star anise. She said it tastes so bad it should be called “star anus,” hence Bill’s title.

(Mrs. Wright is spreading dangerous misinformation, by the way. I am reliably informed by Wikipedia that “Star anise enhances the flavor of meat.”)

In a comment there, Leo tells a remarkably similar story about his own wife. Leo had just switched to a new “all natural” mouthwash made with various spices, and his wife kept smelling him, trying to identify one of the ingredients. Finally she decided that it was, you guessed it, star anise.

About 20 minutes after reading these two star anise anecdotes , I went out for lunch. Bill’s post had mentioned BLTs and had left me craving that prince of sandwiches, so my first thought was to go to a place I know in Taichung that makes excellent BLTs and excellent coffee. It’s about 40 minutes away, though, and going that far during a typhoon just for a sandwich seemed a bit extravagant. By now my craving for excellent black coffee was stronger than my craving for a BLT, so I ended up going to a coffee shop closer to home.

I placed my order and then happened to glance up at the wall behind the counter. Even for someone as jaded to coincidence as myself, this was a bit much:

Yes, that’s star anise. There are several other pictures on the wall in a similar style, but they all depict coffee beans, coffee grinders, and the like. What does star anise have to do with coffee? 

The name of the coffee shop is Donutes, suggesting the word donut (even though they don’t sell that product). A donut has the shape of a ring, which is the etymological meaning of anus.

As I’m sure Debbie will already have noticed, star anise has the shape of an eight-pointed star. (The spice’s Chinese name is literally “eight horns” or “eight corners”; the same word can refer to an octagon.) Star anise is basically brown in color but sufficiently reddish for Bill to have connected it with the “spices of red summer” in the Wallace Stevens poem I recently quoted.

A red spice in the form of an eight-pointed star made me think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo:

RHCP bass player Flea is known to be a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, and there are persistent rumors (denied by the band) that the logo was inspired by Vonnegut’s famous doodle of, what else, an asshole.

Ellen and the thousand ships

Yesterday, William Wright posted, "Ellen DeGeneres, the face that launched a thousand ships, Cartman's hairy a**hole, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" As you can see in the title, he takes a short-haired not-very-feminine celebrity named Ellen and links her to Helen of Troy and to the famous line from Doctor Faustus about how Helen's was "the face that launched a thousand ships."

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this on /x/. I won't link the thread, since I don't want my Australian readers to go to prison for reading it, but it's easy enough to look up on 4plebs.

That's Ellen Page, who now calls herself Elliot and claims to be a man. The post says that Page, who used to be quite pretty before she was sacrificed, "should have launched a thousand battle-ready ships" -- referencing the same Marlowe line that Bill had used in connection with another short-haired lesbian celebrity Ellen.

Notice the roller skates in the picture:

Roller skates have been a major theme on Bill's blogs. And his Ellen post even mentions a hurricane that recently "rolled up Florida."

Bill's post also mentions Carmen Sandiego, who came up because of an error; he had dreamed about the South Park character Eric Cartman but thought his last name was Carmen. (Interestingly, the only real use of of carmen as a common noun in English is in the phrase "a carmen and an error.") This reminded me of the old shareware game Where in Hell is Carmen Santiago, which was both a parody of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and a no-joke introduction to the layout of Dante's Inferno.

I guess if you have a Carmen and an error, you end up with Carmen in hell. Carmen's name was changed to Santiago for copyright reasons, and that name just showed up in my dreams ("James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace").

James, Santiago, Eru, and Charles Wallace

I got to sleep in this morning (day off for the typhoon), which means an extra dose of dreams. Here's what I can remember:

Vignette 1: I was supervising a group of children of various ages who were "writing scriptures." This meant they were copying out Bible verses as a handwriting exercise, but the phrase we used for it, "writing scriptures," can obviously have other meanings. One of the children wasn't writing anything, and I kept asking him, "James, where's your scripture? Where's your scripture, James?"

Vignette 2: A man called Santiago, the patriarch of a large family, was telling me how one day, relatively late in life, he "turned on," started using the name Santiago, and adopted his wife's son to be one of his own sons. I think he had 11 sons of his own, and his wife's son made 12; or perhaps he had 12 of his own, and his wife's son made 13.

Vignette 3: There was an aluminum box with a slot in it, and you could write a question on a strip of paper and put it in the slot. I wrote, "Eru, when did you become Eru?" and put it in the slot, not expecting an answer. (Eru is Tolkien's name for God.) The voice of Eru did answer, though: "Like you, I was not created but born. Like you, I have existed for all eternity, but it was at the age of five that I 'turned on' and began acting as Eru."

Vignette 4: In a hypnopompic postlude, there was only a voice, with no visual component: "At the age of five, he became truly conscious. He became able to meditate and began to understand the nature of things. And that's the story of" -- I thought we were still talking about Eru and was surprised when the sentence instead ended with -- "Charles Wallace."

Comments:

Santiago is the Spanish form of the name James, and both names originally derive from Jacob, the original name of of Israel, the ancestor of the 12 or 13 tribes. (We have 13 distinct tribe names, but each list of the tribes includes only 12 of these; which one is left out varies.) In connection with "writing scriptures," the Book of Mormon refers to scriptures being written both by the Twelve Tribes of Israel (Jacob) and by the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb (two of whom, in New Testament tradition, were called James).

In the dream, I understood the "turning on" references as meaning that an already existing but latent consciousness was suddenly activated and became truly conscious. Of course, the phrase can also refer to using psychedelics. I also thought of the Simon and Garfunkel line, "Pigeons plot in secrecy / And hamsters turn on frequently."

Regarding Eru's answer, it's hard to know how to interpret "at the age of five" in reference to a someone who has "existed for all eternity." I guess it means five years after he was "born," even though he existed before being born.

Charles Wallace -- who apparently also "turned on" at the age of five -- is a character from the novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle, which I haven't read since I was nine or ten. His name showing up in the dream was quite unexpected. I don't remember too much about this character except that he's a sort of child prodigy and psychic, which I guess fits with his apparently becoming enlightened at the ripe old age of five. Incidentally, the title A Wrinkle in Time refers to the idea (called a "tesseract" in the novel) of traveling by folding the fabric of spacetime, a theme that has come up a lot recently.

The name Charles Wallace also made me think of the poet Wallace Stevens, and upon waking I took down his collected works and opened it at random. I found myself reading "World Without Peculiarity," and these lines jumped out at me as synchronistically relevant:

The red ripeness of round leaves is thick

With the spices of red summer.

Leaves aren't usually described as "round," but on August 8 I posted "Round leaves and chip monks," introducing the "chip monk" idea that William Wright would later take and run with.

Like clowns

Today I downloaded Paul Stobbs’s new book The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns — because, well, how can you know there’s a book with that title and not want to read it? If it had been called The Demonic History of Clowns, or even just Clowns and the Nephilim, I might have given it a miss, but something about that title, The Nephilim Looked Like Clowns, is just irresistible. It’s like the Snakes on a Plane of books.

Shortly after I’d downloaded it, one of my very young students told me she’d been to the circus on the weekend and seen clowns. The circus? When was the last time you heard of anyone going to the circus?

Later the same day, in a different class, a student said (in Chinese) to a classmate who had been blowing his nose a lot, “If you keep doing that, you’re going to look like a clown! Because clowns always have red noses,”

No idea what this means, if anything, Just following my usual practice of noting coincidences.